ANONYMOUS:I've been getting into Pablo Neruda's poems lately and they make me cry but it's just so fucking good I keep coming back for more. Anyway, his poem 'Don't go far off, not even for a day' reminds me of Posner so much, and I could just imagine him reciting it to himself while worrying about Scripps coming home when it's raining really heavily or something like that.

asexualscripps:ohhh man this gave me the biggest plot bunny tho i’ll warn you that this is not that nice in terms of a plot event:

so, right, it’s the mid-90s and they’ve moved to Manchester together, into a little house on the outskirts and they’ve probably got a cat (Scripps got a job at one of the northern branches of the big papers so they had to move, and Posner manages to get a temp position at one of the posher schools there)

then, it’s just a Saturday in June and nothing’s going on, they’ve nothing planned except a quiet dinner in with Scripps’s parents that night. Scripps has a last minute piece he needs to get to the office for the Sunday issue, so he picks up his bags and his papers and the car keys, kisses Posner before he leaves and says he’ll be back soon.

then the city centre gets blown up.

and Posner doesn’t find out immediately, because this was pre-everyone having a phone on their person at all times, so he gets a call a few hours after the fact from Akthar (who’d found out through one of his wife’s colleagues) panicking like “are you both okay??”

and Posner doesn’t know what’s going on so Akthar tells him and Posner immediately flies into a panic because Scripps work oh god where is he is he okay is he alive is he is he is he–

so he hangs up on Akthar without so much as a goodbye, rings around every hospital and none of them have heard anything and even if they have he’s not sure they’d tell him anything because he’s just a “friend”, he’s not family and they’re not married and it is the 90s so the whole boyfriend-of-ten-years thing isn’t something they want to blurt out to people they don’t know and trust.

so he has to wait and wait and wait and it’s horrible and he about drinks the house out of tea and he cries, a lot, and he sits there staring at the door and he just starts by thinking this poem to himself, to try and calm his thoughts down, except that only works for so long so he ends up saying it and saying it over and over until it’s almost turning dark and there’s still no sign and he’s starting to wonder whether it’s worth calling the hospitals again to see if they’ve heard anything more and–

and then there’s the noise of a key in a lock and Posner’s on his feet and Scripps is there, a bit worse for wear and there’s a bit of blood on his shirt (“Not mine,” he’ll insist later, when Posner asks. “The woman next to me, she was hurt and I couldn’t just leave her there.”) but he’s okay and he’s not hurt and he’s whole and he’s there and Posner’s crying more than he’ll admit to (but so is Scripps, because what they leave out of news reports of bombings is the way it shakes you out of your bones and pushes your organs into your mouth and you feel nothing but fear fear fear) and they’re kissing against the wall of the hallway and the front door is barely shut and they should really call Scripps’s parents and Akthar and everyone just so they know they’re alright.

and then Posner mumbles it under his breath, like a litany against the line of Scripps’s jaw, “Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because – because – I don’t know how to say it: a day is long and I will be waiting for you–”